VIENNA -- Austria takes over the European Union's
presidency in July, for its first time, which presents Austria, in
its turn, with the problem of providing Europe with a
telephone number. Henry Kissinger once appositely remarked
that he would believe in ``Europe'' when someone gave him
a phone number to call to get in touch with it.

This task is a particular problem for Austria, since it is a small
country, a neutral, and is undergoing a self-examination
concerning its own relationship with Europe. Austria's
anxieties are largely unappreciated elsewhere, and may even
seem baroque, but they are matters of strenuous debate.

They are given exposure, sometimes brilliantly so, in the latest
issue of the noted Vienna quarterly, Europaische Rundschau. As this is the journal's 25th
anniversary issue, it is available in English and French as well
as German (Ebendorferstrasse 6/4, A-1010 Vienna).

To summarize (or abbreviate) Austria's self-examination, it
asks where Austria today belongs between the west and east
of Europe. This would seem very simple to answer, but history
as well as current political feelings produce confusion and
argument about the matter.

The Austrian emperors were once the sovereigns of the
German Holy Roman Empire, which incorporated not only
various principalities of German-speaking Europe, but
because of wars and dynastic marriages, came to unite them
with Spain, a part of Italy, Burgundy, the low countries, and
eventually Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary in Central Europe.

Thanks to that, Austria made itself the defender of Catholic
Europe's eastern frontier, confronting the Moslem Ottoman
Empire, whose troops twice unsuccessfully besieged Vienna.
By the late 18th century, however, Prussia was on its way to
great power status, unifying the other German states at
Austrian expense.

Austria was left a dual monarchy, composed of Austria itself,
the Kingdom of Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia, the Czech lands,
and Galicia (which included parts of modern-day Poland and
Ukraine). In 1910 the population was 50 million people.
(Britain at the time had 45 million inhabitants, and Germany
65 million.)

Vienna was the cultural and educational as well as the
political and economic center of this multilingual empire -- a
westernizing influence on the rest, but at the same time one
whose domination provoked nationalist reactions. The world
war destroyed the system: that, and Woodrow Wilson's
crusade during the Versailles treaty negotiations to give
national self-determination to all the Hapsburg peoples.

From being a great multinational empire and Western
Europe's bridge to the East, Austria was turned into a small
German-speaking state of 6.5 million people with no
apparent reason for independent existence. Thus Hitler could
and did take it over.

After the second world war, when the Soviet Union withdrew
its troops in 1955, Austria reclaimed independence,
becoming a formally neutral country in the Cold War, but
once again a frontier country, on the Warsaw Pact's front line.

Now Austria is a member of the European Union, although
not of NATO. NATO's expansion is a very controversial matter
in Austria, since all three countries expected to be
incorporated initially -- Hungary, the Czech Republic, and
Poland -- are Austria's neighbors, and all were at one time or
another part of its empire.

All of them are also candidates to become members of the
European Union, and have begun preliminary negotiations
with Brussels. Where does that leave Austria?

Uniquely placed, as one might say -- but uniquely placed to
do what? Neutrality no longer has any real meaning, although
some Austrians like to think of themselves as an Alpine state
that should look towards another neutral country,
Switzerland, which has made a national career out of
neutrality, but in a geographical situation where it could
afford to do so. Austria is the crossroads of southern Europe.

Karl-Markus Gauss writes in the Europaische Rundschau that
EU membership has encouraged Austrians to claim to be ``a
normal country among all the other normal (that is, western
European) countries.'' He objects to this because it denies
Austria's special history and allows it to reject any attempt
``to make something meaningful out of the contradictory
heritage of its history, out of the often painful experience of
being historically caught up with the central European
countries for many centuries.''

His argument is that Austria should not, but also cannot,
dissociate itself from all of its old and complicated relations
with central Europe and the Balkans. These actually provide
an opportunity of great value to the European Union, as it
opens itself to the ex-Communist -- and ex-Austro-Hungarian
-- states of central Europe. However this is a controversial
argument in Austria.

With its own role under debate and unresolved, the Austrian
government approaches its EU presidency with a
conventionally platitudinous view of foreign policy for the
European Union as a whole.

The foreign minister and vice-chancellor, Wolfgang Schussel, writes of the European Union
helping to keep the Dayton accords functioning, trying to do
something about Cyprus, and encouraging Middle Eastern
peace -- all things which the United States has in hand, or
thinks that it does, and on which it prefers no advice from
Europe. With that as Europe's aspirant ``CFSP,'' its common
foreign and security policy, it really doesn't matter that Europe
doesn't have a phone
number.

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